Editors originally aimed to attract readers by getting the magazine positioned alongside 90s lads' mags but focus groups, audience research and cover trials have shown a shift in attitudes.
And they listened to an expert in the booming business of museum marketing — a field many museum leaders view with suspicion — talk about focus groups, audience expectations and branding ("the B word," as the expert, Arthur Cohen, delicately described it).
It belongs to a group of "research process" texts written for a small-group audience (typically the admission committee), but may nonetheless be "seriously invested with demonstrated scholarship and... representing their authors in a favorable professional light" (46).
Orchestras across the country are fumbling for ways to make the concert experience more "intimate" and "emotional," which is what, according to surveys and focus groups, audiences crave.
On the other hand, this attitude probably reflects a realistic assessment of the limited willingness of these groups' audiences (primarily scientists and research oversight bodies) to seriously consider the possibility that most animal research is ethically unjustifiable.
On a good night with the Fall, Smith acts like a lightning conductor to group and audience.
At Irving Plaza on Sunday night the group asked audience members to stump the guitarist Brown Sound by naming a metal band whose songs he couldn't play.
Dancers in the Israeli company mix sound (lots of "ha!" and "hey!"), group formation, audience participation and moving moments of stillness.
But the conservative censure of theatrical critics and cognoscenti can be blown away by that unpredictable, potentially unruly group, the audience.
